"You mean, do I imagine the machines are pure, and humans alone corrupt the works? No." Aleka's laugh sounded forlorn. "Maybe I'm eccentric in not thinking the Teramind has anything particular to do with God."
"Then I'm eccentric too," Kenmuir agreed.
Through him went: What was the Teramind? The culmination, the supreme expression of the cybercosm? No. The lesser sophotectic intellects, some of them outranging anything the human brain could conceive, took part in it, but they were not it, any more than cliffs and crags are the peak of a mountain. A single planetwide organism would be too slow, too loose; light-speed crawls where thought would leap. The machines, ever improving themselves, had created a supreme engine of awareness, somewhere on Earth—
White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men were born—
and it engaged in its mysteries while, surely, heightening its own mightiness; but it was not omniscient or omnipotent, it was not everywhere.
Its underlings, though, might be anywhere.
He must assume that none were here. Else his battle was already lost.
"I do admit, basically this is a good world," Aleka said. Her gaze sought peace in the boisterous water. "I don't want to overthrow it. I feel guilty, lying to our decent, kind hosts. All I want is freedom for my folk to be what they are."
For which end she did indeed lie, Kenmuir thought, and she would defy the whole civilization of which she spoke so well, until she had won or it had convinced her that her cause was wrong.
Why had it not? Why this secrecy, these . . . machinations?
"I'm no revolutionary either," he said, while rebellion stirred within him. "I'd just like to see things, well, shaken up a bit."
Her look returned to him. During their hours in Overburg they had barely begun to know one another. He became acutely aware of her fullness, lips and breasts and hips and round strong limbs. "Why would you?" she asked.
"Oh," he floundered, "too complacent—When was the last scientific discovery that amounted to more than the next decimal place or the newest archeological dig? Who's pioneering in music, graphics, poetry, any art? Where's the frontier?"
"Regardless," she gainsaid him—how spirited she was—"you're trying to stop the Habitat."
Lilisaire's mission, he thought. His selfishness. But he couldn't confess that. Most especially not to himself. "Lunarian society deserves to survive," he replied lamely. "It's different from anything on Earth, a, a leaven." He stared about him, randomly into the forest. "It's created its own beautiful places, you know."
* * * *
28
The Mother of the Moon
T
hey were a trio that drew glances as they passed through Tychopolis—the big, white-maned woman, her broad countenance lined across the brow and at the mouth and eyes but her back straight and her stride limber, the tall man, also Earth-born, his locks equally white and the gaunt face weathered, likewise still in full health; and the Lunarian, coppery-dark of skin below the midnight hair, making the slanty sleet-gray eyes seem doubly large. In flare-collared scarlet cloak, gold-and-bronze tunic with a sunburst at the belt, blue hose, he might have been setting youthful flamboyance against the plain unisuits of the elders; but his expression was too bleak.
At the lifelock he identified himself to the portal. It opened on an elevator terminus. "This is a service entrance," he explained. "The public access is closed for reconstruction." His English was less idiomatic and lilting than that of most among his generation, perhaps because in his work he necessarily called on many Terrestrial databases and consulted with many Terrestrial experts.
"I know that, of course," Lars Rydberg answered. "I am not sure just what sort of reconstruction it is."
Eyrnen led the way into the elevator. "We can ill allow animals, seeds, or spores from low-level to get into the city. Think of bees nesting in ventilators, squirrels gnawing on electrical cables, or disease germs which the high mutation rate here may have turned into a medical surprise for us."
Dagny Beynac sensed the implied insult. "My son is quite well acquainted with the obvious," she said tartly.
"I pray pardon, sir," Eyrnen said to Rydberg. He did not sound as if he meant it. "I did but wish to ensure that the problem stood clear before you. Some folk confuse our situation with that of the L-5 colony. Yonder they have no more than large, closely managed parks. We are fashioning a wilderness."
Rydberg went along with the half-conciliation. "No offense," he answered. "I do know this, but wondered about the technical details. It's very good of you to show us around."
It was, even if the bioengineer's grandmother had specifically requested it for herself as well as her visitor, and a request from Dagny Beynac had on the Moon somewhat the force of a royal command. Quite a few Lunarians would have refused anyway, or at least taken the opportunity to display icy, impeccably formal insolence.
Odd that this son of Jinann should show what hostility he did. She was always the most Earthling-like of the Beynac children, the most amicable toward the mother world. Well, Eyrnen belonged to the next generation.
And was he actually hostile? Rydberg thought of a cat asserting itself before a dog, warning the alien lest a fight erupt. Could that be Eyrnen's intent? Rydberg smothered a sigh. He didn't understand Lunarians. He wondered how well his mother did.
"A pleasure," the engineer was saying. "My lady grandmother has not guested these parts in some time. We have much new to reveal." He did not add outright that he'd rather she'd come unaccompanied. Instead: "She has been overly occupied on behalf of her people." Against the encroachments of Earth, he left unspoken.
Rydberg's ears popped. They were going deep indeed.
He admired the deftness with which Beynac intervened: "About those technicalities, I'd be interested to hear, too. Okay, you've got a long tunnel, for trucking bulky loads and numbers of passengers to and fro. Valves at either end keep the noticeable animals on the reservation. As you said, it's the bugs and seeds and microbes and such that could sneak by. But I thought your sensors and mini robots were keeping them well zapped. I haven't heard of anything escaping that couldn't easily be taken care of."
Maybe she was giving Eyrnen a taste of his own medicine, no matter how innocent her smile. He accepted it, replying, "The improvements in the lifelock are partwise qualitative, better technology, but mainwise quantitative, more of everything. As the ecology below strengthens and increases its fertility, and as the region grows, invasive pressures will heighten. We must anticipate them."
The elevator hissed to a stop, the door slid open, and the three emerged onto a balcony from which a ramp spiraled on downward. Rydberg caught his breath.
He stood near the ceiling of a cavern whose floor was almost two kilometers beneath him. The inset sunlike lamps that lighted it shone, as yet, gently, for this was "morning" in their cycle. They made warm a breeze that wandered past, bearing odors of forest which must be thick and sweet on the ground. Distance hazed and blued the air; seen across tens of kilometers, the other walls were dim, half unreal. Cloudlets drifted about. Birds flew by. So did a human a ways off, wings spread iridescent from the arms, banking and soaring not in sport—that was for such places as Avis Park—but watchful over the domain. It stretched in a thousand-hued greenness of crowns, and meadows starred with wildflowers, and a waterfall that stabbed out of sheer rock to form a lake from which a stream wound aglitter. . . .
Eyrnen let the others stand mute a while before he said, "Let us go and walk the trails. Shall I summon a car for the ramp?"
"Not for me!" Beynac exclaimed. She took the lead, in Lunar bounds, as a girl might have.
* * * *
"It's a wonderful creation," she had said the duskwatch before. "I look forward on my own account, but still more to seeing you see it for the first time."
Having finished supper, they lingered over coffee and liqueurs. Drinks had preceded the food and a b
ottle of wine complemented it, for this celebrated the beginning of several daycycles she had arranged free of duties. Her son had completed his business for Fireball and meant to spend that period with her before going home. They were all too seldom together. A glow was in their veins, an easiness in their hearts.
She had cooked the meal herself, to a high standard, but served it in the kitchen. Now that she lived alone, except for, visits like his, she saved her baronial dining room for parties. The kitchen was amply spacious, an abode of burnished copper, Mexican tile, and fragrances. A picture of Edmond Beynac in his later years, at his desk, looked across it to a Constable landscape reproduced by molecular scan. A Vivaldi concerto danced in the background.
"I'm eager," Lars said. "From everything I have screened about it—" He hesitated. "That's not much."
If only the Lunarians would cooperate with the news media, at least about matters as harmless and to their credit as this, he thought. If it weren't for the Earth-gene Moondwellers, what would Earth ever learn?
Dagny let his remark pass. "I've been far too long away from it," she mused. "I do miss natural nature."
"Most of your communities have lovely parks."
"Oh, yes." Her glance went to the painting. "But no living hinterlands."
He smiled. "If that's what you wish for, come see us again on Vancouver Island."
She smiled back, shaking her head a bit. "I've probably grown too creaky for the weight."
"You, at a mere ninety? Nonsense." Not just because of faithfulness about her biomed program and regular vigorous exercise in the centrifuge, he thought. She'd had luck in the heredity sweepstakes, and shared the prize with him. He did not feel greatly diminished in his own mid-seventies. "Do come."
"Well, maybe." She sighed. "There's always so bloody much to do, and the months go by so fast."
"Come for Christmas," he urged.
Her face kindled. "With your grandchildren!"
She had great-grandchildren here, but they were Lunarian.
She loved them, he felt sure, and no doubt they liked well enough the old lady who brought them presents and had the grace not to hug them or gush over them; but did they listen to her stories and songs with any deep feeling, did they ever care to romp with her?
"I'll bring along a great-grandchild of mine to help you celebrate your hundredth birthday," he said impulsively.
She laughed low. The light caught a glistening in her eyes. "You're a darling, once you've had a smidgen of alcohol to dissolve that Swedish starch." Her look sought her husband's image. "Oh, 'Mond," she whispered, "I do wish you could've known him better."
The picture was an animation. Because of the comfort between them, Lars asked what would otherwise never have escaped him: "Do you activate that very often?"
"Not often any more," she answered. "I know it so well, you see."
"All these years," he blurted. "Nobody else. You must have had offers."
Sudden merriment rang forth. "Lots, though the last one was a fairish time ago. I was tempted occasionally, but never enough. 'Mond kept right on being too much competition for 'em."
The smile waned. She looked elsewhere. "Although," she said, "he's become like a dream I had once long ago."
"We live by our dreams, do we not?" he replied as softly.
* * * *
It was a temperate-zone forest. Near Port Bowen, a tropical environment was under development, less far along because excavators did not have the fortune of starting but with hollows as big as were here. Talk went of making a prairie, or else a small sea, below Korolev Crater, but probably population and industry on Farside would remain too sparse for decades to support such an effort.
Eyrnen guided his kin folk down a path along which elm and ash and the occasional oak arched leaves above underbrush where wild currants had begun to ripen. Deeper in the wood, birch gleamed white and light-spatters speckled shade. Butterflies fluttered brilliant in the air; the call of a cuckoo rippled its moist stillness. Where leaves from former years had blown onto the trail, they rustled underfoot. Smells were of summer. Yet this was no Terrestrial wild. Biotechnology had forced the growth; low gravity would let it go dizzyingly high.
A winged creature swept past and vanished again into the depths. It had been small, brightly furred, with a ruddering tail. A shrill cry died away in its wake. "What was that?" Rydberg asked.
"A daybat," Eyrnen told him. "One of our genetic experiments. Besides being ornamental, we hope it will help keep the population of necessary insects stable."
"It'll be quite a spell, with quite a few mistakes along the way, before you have a real, self-maintaining ecology," Beynac predicted.
"It is evolving more quickly than was forecast," Eyrnen replied. "I will live to walk through a true wilderness."
"Oh, scarcely that," Rydberg demurred. At once he regretted it. Bad habit, correcting other people's impressions.
Eyrnen glared at him and snapped, "How genuine is any of your so-called nature on Earth?"
"Down, boys," Beynac said. She could bring it off. To Rydberg: "Don't be persnickety, dear. What is nature, anyway? There'll be life that can do without human or robot attention, as long as the energy comes in; and don't forget, that's solar energy, good for several billion years."
Rydberg nodded. "True." The optical conduits that led it from the surface wouldn't likely give out. The molecular resonances that imposed a twenty-four-hour night-and-day cycle and the changing of the seasons might get deranged, but while some species would die off, others would adapt.
And, eventually, new breeds appear? As the sun grew hotter until runaway greenhouse effect seared and boiled Earth barren, could this forest endure, gone strange, in the deeps of the Moon?
He made his remark prosaic: "From what I have heard, a solidly viable ecology requires more space than this."
"So the scientists declare," Eyrnen conceded. "I think forms can be bred that would not need it. However, the point is moot, because the realms will in fact be vastly increased. At last, perhaps a century hence, all will be linked together."
"Hm, what a monstrous job."
"In future we will not depend on machinery to carve out volumes where geology has not provided them. Bacteria already in the laboratories can break down rock, multiplying as they do. It will take more energy than is available today, and of course they must be modified to fit into the ecology, but these are matters readily dealt with when the time comes."
Although Rydberg had encountered such ideas before, it had been as speculations. To hear them calmly set forth as certainties was exciting. "How much expansion do you suppose will happen in your lifetime?" he asked.
A supple shrug raised and lowered Hymen's shoulders as his hands flickered. "Less than might be. We have too many various demands on our resources, and Earth is a sink for them."
Beynac lifted a fist. "I told you, God damn it, no politics today!" she cried.
Eyrnen cast Rydberg a rueful, almost friendly grin and relaxed. The Earthling returned it.
Inwardly, though, he knew a cold moment. He wanted, he truly wanted kindliness between himself and the other children of his mother, and their children. Never had he won to more than a polite tolerance. It wasn't simply that they were different. He had gotten along well with metamorphs more radical than these. She knew what the overt problem was, and had just given it a name—politics, the wretched politics. But it was itself merely a symptom, a working, of the real trouble, like fever and buboes in medieval plague.
Property; the common heritage issue. Taxation. Education. Census. Home rule: legislation, legislature, the very concept of democracy and its desirability. Exclusivism. Legitimacy of power; negotiation, criminal law, sanctuary. And more disputes and more, some trivial in themselves but salt rubbed into the wound. . . .
What brought conflict on, Rydberg thought, was a heightening strife between an old civilization and one that was nascent; no, between an old biological species and one that was new, perhaps unstable.<
br />
While Dagny, his mother, stood torn between them.
Why had she hushed and shunted aside his questions about the death of Sigurd-Kaino, his half-brother? Somehow, on some remote asteroid—He had asked no further, because that was clearly what she wanted. But why?
Her Lunarian children claimed silence of her.
His mind went to his half-sister Gabrielle-Verdea, still in her sixties as fierce, as insurgent a speaker as her gene-kindred possessed. Through him keened a song of hers. Lunarian, it could not well be rendered in Terrestrial words, and his knowledge of its native tongue was limited to the practicalities in which all languages are about equal; but—
With your Pacific eye, observe my scars
Of ancient wars.
Your bones remember dinosaurs.
The Stars are also Fire - [Harvest the Stars 02] Page 39
